Oxford US-UK Academic Policy Dialogue on Countering Violent Extremism

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Policies that target the conditions supporting violent extremism are core to the current counter-terrorism efforts of both the UK and US governments. Led by Andrea Ruggeri and Carlotta Minnella, this project seeks to create wide-ranging dialogue between academics and policymakers in the UK and United States. This dialogue will inform analysis and improve the development of policy programmes for Countering Violent Extremism (CVE).

Rationale and research background

Improving the design and delivery of CVE policies remains a central objective for both the UK Government and the US State Department (DOS). Polices to target violent extremism lie at the core of both UK and US counter-terrorism efforts. This project seeks to facilitate dialogue on the conditions that give rise to violent extremism and measures to reduce it, between academic research and UK and US policy interests.

The project is led by Professor Andrea Ruggeri (DPIR) and by Dr. Carlotta Minnella (DPIR).

The main institutional partner is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (F&CO). Additional partnerships include the Programme on Extremism at George Washington University and the Washington Institute.

Project Objectives

Our goal is to connect policy-makers and academic researchers in order to better facilitate research-sharing and policy discussions on CVE programming. We aim to enhance academic impact on the development, design, content and delivery of CVE policies and;

Create an ongoing dialogue between practitioners and academics from several academic disciplines;

Facilitate and accelerate the use of research from DPIR and other departments in policy development;

Harness the advantages academia typically holds over government analytics departments in the development of evidence-based analyses;

Pilot the role of Oxford University, and in particular the Department of Politics and International Relations as a facilitator and hub for partnerships with government and other agencies in the development of CVE policies.

This initiative has the potential to produce a new mechanism for co-development of analyses and policy frames between University of Oxford academics and Foreign, Home Office, and US partners.

The initiative has an interdisciplinary scope, and engages all CVE-related expertise and research carried out across Oxford Departments (the Department of Politics and International Relations, including Changing Character of War, Cyber Studies and area studies programmes; Department for International Development and the Department for Experimental Psychology). The proposed academic-policy dialogue offers an innovative, structured, and institutionalised means to sharpen policy impact.